Scholarly record

CONCEPTUAL FOUNDATION OF EVENT- REFERENTIAL AMBIGUITY

V. I. Zabotkina, E. L. Boyarskaya

Abstract

Ambiguity is inherent to everyday human communication. It implies that there are two distinct senses assigned to one acoustic form. This research aims to contribute to an integrated interdisciplinary theory of ambiguity as a cognitive phenomenon and identify conceptual mechanisms underlying it. To this end, a variety of empirical and theoretical research methods, including referential analysis (understood in a broader sense as referring to a particular cognitive context used for disambiguation) are employed for the analysis of texts central to modern political discourse. We argue that unlike polysemy, which remains unconscious for participants of communication, ambiguity, its presence and effects are consciously perceived. We posit that intended ambiguity occurs when the speaker intentionally does not follow the logic of priming. Each sense of a polysemous word is primed differently. It results in conceptual and pragmatic effects dependent on the parameters of the cognitive context. Each polysemous word is associated with a set of dynamic cognitive contexts forming a complex multi-dimensional mental representation, which could potentially capture and store a significant amount of conceptual information, referring to any number of conceptual domains that are relevant to the identification and inferencing a particular sense of the word. We prove that event-referential ambiguity can be viewed as a means of manipulation of human consciousness and behaviour.

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DOI resolver: doi.org/10.5593/sgemsocial2018/3.6/S14.019

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